THE CRAFT CHALLENGE

 

Hey all, in order to force myself to get off my laurels and keep posting, for a couple of months I joined The Pop of Red’s blog Craft Challenge.

The premise is, we are told the item that we need to use in our craft post each month and then we are let loose to do what we do. July is sewing.

If you are interested in joining the challenge, email Emily at apopofred@gmail.com.  I dare ya.

I am, as many of you know, not much of a seamstress.  Sooo I took liberties as I love to do.  They didn’t say I COULDN’T…

I’ve always wanted to try painting a pixelated painting.  I googled pixel images and found one I liked that didn’t look too hard to copy. Next I needed a grid.  This is where the sewing part of the challenge comes in for me.

I looked everywhere for that cardboard grid that real seamstresses use, like this:

But no second hand store around me had any.  I went to a lovely store called Laura’s fabrics where the fab staff showed me a new cardboard grid.  $20.00.  Nope. Not doing that. And THEN, they showed me this:

Cue the angels singing.  It’s this gauzy fabric grid. $5.00!! Sold.  I glued it to an old cardboard backing from an old frame with this:

I found myself a pic I liked from google images, printed it on my printer, took a photo of the print-out with my iphone and changed it to b&w. Oh, I’m pretty sure there is an easier way, but I wasn’t interested in the eye rolling I’d receive from the daughter, so I did what I knew.

Then came the fun part.  I started with straight black and white craft paint.

First came the black squares.  I counted down how many squares I needed as I painted.  I coloured in the squares on the print-out as I painted them so I wouldn’t get confused by which I had done and not done, since becoming confused tends to happen more often than I’d like to admit.  Be sure to do a solid job of painting each square, because going back and trying to match the grays could prove challenging.  For each gradation of gray, I added a blob of white to lighten the previous gray and moved through the squares until they were all filled in just like the print-out.

In this shot it looks like there are white bits in the painted squares, but the paint is wet and shiny, not white.  I painted an ombre’ background, going from white to turquoise.Close up, it looks like a bunch of sloppy squares, buuuut from far away….

It looks like a lady looking at the water!  I know this to be true since I quizzed everyone who came within a block of me.  They weren’t just appeasing a crazy lady, were they?  I plan to frame it and hang it far enough away so she remains forever gazing upon the waves and people won’t question “What the??”

Next month’s challenge?  Dollar Store finds.  OY!

 

 

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